Books for the beach: the great annual dilemma

Loki with, err, her gospel

And so it begins: the great annual kerfuffle about What Books am I Taking on Holiday.

It brings with it the annual question of: ‘why don’t you get a Kindle?’ Well, I have a tablet, and I read news and features on it, but don’t particularly like reading anything longer.

I love the feel, the heft, the smell, the sense of a real book.

And however good the backlighting is on a device, glass does not take well to being buffeted by sand (oddly enough) and other elements, while computer technology does not, generally speaking, make good bedfellows with water.

I don’t an electronic device into the bath – so why would I risk dropping one into the sea or similar?

Books it is – and this ritual is one that, even in its apparent indecisiveness, I enjoy.

Of course, it adds weight to the baggage, but I’m not travelling by air.

The Other Half is being seriously serious this time around, with an intention of taking Piketty for the beach – only a doubting Thomas would not concede that Capital in the Twenty-First Century has already caused enough of a stir to render the first name of its author as superfluous.

And Bertolt Brecht: A Literary Life, a massive new biography by Stephen Parker, is also sitting ready to find a corner in the case.

My own reading list is somewhat different – although the Brecht will be available if the mood takes me.

First up is The Colours of Catalonia: In the Footsteps of Twentieth-Century Artists by Virginie Raguenaud, which I bought in Collioure in the first place – and will now take back to provide artistic background for this trip.

It does, of course, include a section on Collioure and Matisse and the Fauves. And Raguenaud talks of Ceret and Elne, of Picasso and Survage.

Museums Without Walls, by Jonathan Meades, is also penciled in for provision of pithy pointers to looking at and reading the built environment around us.

And then I have Five Quarters of the Orange, Holy Fools and Coastliners – three novels, all set in France, by Joanne Harris, together with The Gospel of Loki, her reworking of Norse myth from earlier this year.

Harris is one of those writers I haven’t read as much of as I have meant to – but that’s largely out of fear. For ages, I dreaded any of her other titles being a let-down after the glories of Chocolat, which is a rare beast, in that it’s a book I’ve read rather more than once.

Back in 2005, I reviewed Gentlemen and Players for a magazine – and thoroughly enjoyed that too – but subsequent re-reads of Chocolat and a first reading of its sequel, The Lollipop Shoes, were as far as I dipped my foot into Harris’s oeuvre until dipping into Blackberry Wine a week or so ago.

I’d always intended to get a copy of The Gospel of Loki, but this has not been a big reading year, so hadn’t got around to it until The Other Half suggested it for the holiday list.

One Amazon reviewer suggested that Loki won’t appeal to anyone who liked Chocolat, but that seems a remarkably limiting idea with no logic.

I love Chocolat – and I love the Norse myths. I can’t be unique – well, not on that score, at least.

As Terry Pratchett’s dust jacket biog points out, he is “sometimes accused of literature”.

Harris is, first and foremost, a wonderful storyteller, with a great ability to weave modern fairytales – on occasion, very darkly – and to employ magic realism, but she’s also a writer of the sort of subtlety that the same can be said of her: indeed, she makes me think of Angela Carter.

Take Chocolat: it’s a wonderful story, but it’s also ‘about’ so much: about life, living, pleasure and guilt, and it leaves you with plenty of food for thought.

My mother didn’t like it, but then it was only some time after I’d given her a copy that it dawned on me that Harris’s approach to both the sensual pleasures of life and to religion might not entirely have appealed to her.

C’est la vie, as those damnable Frenchies might say.

Blackberry Wine is a great read, and as I turned the final page and brushed away a tear – yes, you really do care that much about the characters Harris creates – thus was born the feeling that Proust can wait.

Little pots of silky lusciousness

Little ramekins of loveliness

As with pretty much anything else in life, if you stick with something, you will learn.

One of my earliest cookery books was Gordon Ramsey’s Passion for Flavour.

Having started cooking, I’d finally picked up his little book of pasta sauces that had come with two pasta bowls and some herbs in a Christmas gift from The Other Half.

Having nearly dazzled myself by managing a velouté sauce, I’d reached for the stars with far more complex dishes in a full book.

It gave us, without too much pain, venison with a chocolate sauce, and crème brûlée with roasted rhubarb.

Well, I say without “too much pain”, but the latter might have involved beginner’s luck, because when I tried it subsequently, the times when I produced something akin to scrambled eggs rather outnumbered the times I managed a silky custard.

At the weekend, however, I needed a recipe for a set custard, since I was making créme Catalan to finish a Catalan meal – Boles de Picolat – as the main, with olives, an anchovy paste (from Collioure), bread and a homemade tapenade to begin.

Créme Catalan is a close relative of the crème brûlée, but is flavoured with orange and has slightly softer texture than the more familiar French version.

Given that the basis is set custard, I decided to return – carefully – to Ramsey’s recipe. And there, I noticed something.

“When the cream mixture starts to boil and rise ...” says the recipe.

It struck me that this is the root of the problem: if the milk/cream is that hot, it’s more likely to scramble to egg mix.

I decided to try it slightly differently.

The milk and cream were heated, but not to boiling point, before being drizzled onto the egg yolk and caster sugar mix and stirred gently in.

Everything was then returned to a clean pan and heated through gently until it started to thicken a little, when the strained juice of a mandarin was added and the mixture was decanted into ramekins.

These were popped in a roasting tin with a little water, and baked in a low oven for around 40 minutes.

After that, they were chilled and went into the fridge over night.

Cometh the hour, however, my blowtorch had run out of fuel and the can I’d bought earlier in the day didn’t have the right fitment, so the only option was the grill.

Using caster sugar instead of anything heavier, I eventually got the tops caramelised – with the added benefit that the heat of the grill had gently softened and warmed the custard, which was very pleasant.

They were silky smooth, with a nice hint of citrus – no hint of scrambled egg.

The lesson, it seems, is not always to fret about cooking to the letter of a recipe, but learning to trust your own instincts and also your own understanding of what is going on.

The ramekins were served, incidentally, with a garnish of redcurrants and physalis – the latter of which was absolutely made for such a purpose.

Such lessons are handy – and today has seen a similar situation as I made a mandarin sorbet. Recipes seemed to have vast amounts of sugar, but I didn’t worry too much about reducing it – or at least the ratio of sugar to juice.

Around a dozen fruits were juiced and sieved, with a generous squeeze of lemon juice added.

To that was added a syrup of 250ml water and around 210 caster sugar that had been allowed to cool after the sugar had all dissolved.

This was then decanted into a box and popped in the freezer.

Take a fork to mix it thoroughly once an hour for about three hours, and then simply allow it to freeze completely.

So easy – and a perfect palate refresher.

And with that, the pre-Christmas prep moves into a new gear.

North and south on a plate

Boles de picolat

It seems almost impossible that only just over a week ago, the days were still sunny and hot, with humid nights.

It’s perfectly possible that such weather could return to grant us an Indian summer, but at present, it feels very much autumnal.

The nights are lengthening and the days shortening. The tipping point cannot be far away.

As we emerged from the British Museum on Friday evening at around 7.20pm, it was already pretty much dark, and rain was pitching down.

It didn’t stop until the following morning, yet there was something comforting in hearing the rhythmic pattering outside as I curled up in bed later.

The temperature has dropped and, while it’s not actually cold, it’s a lot cooler. The weekend saw more rain and some pretty blustery wind, largely grey skies, and the first signs of yellowing leaves on the two tall, slender silver birches in the carpark.

When all this is happening, the last thing you want to eat is salad.

I had already contacted Longwood Farm early last week, deciding that a slow Sunday afternoon cook was perfect and could easily be done again.

This time, it was shin of beef and beef kidney for a Vlaamse Stoverij, the Flemish dish that we first ate in Bruges 18 months ago.

The meats are diced and sautéed, followed by onion, carrot and celery. Everything goes into the big Le Creuset pot and is topped with three bay leaves, a sprig of thyme and a slice of bread, spread on one side with mustard.

Then it’s all covered with beer, lidded, and popped into the oven.

I stuck with the 160˚C (fan) from last week’s casserole and cooked it for approximately four hours.

Shin has to be cooked for a long time so that all the connective tissue beaks down, but it’s a cheap and tasty cut – and not one you’ll easily find in a supermarket.

And that was pretty much that.

But if Sunday’s dish evoked northern Europe, and that fluid region where the northernmost part of France meets the south of Belgium, Saturday’s food was all of the south.

I have cooked Boles de Picolat before, but only from that sort of point where you’ve never tasted a dish and are, ultimately, guessing what it should be like.

After our experience at Le Marinade, I decided to give it another whirl.

As with so much traditional food, there is no one cast-in-stone way of doing it.

Between French-language Catalan recipe books and a recipe postcard, I have five recipes – and all are different. One even calls for a small cup of coffee to be added.

The nearest coffee came to my version was the mug beside me as I spent an amiable hour or so studying the recipes on Saturday morning. After that, the books were put away and I worked from the memory of that meal in Collioure, taking a general sense of all the written recipes I’d looked at and combining it with the fact that meatballs are something I consider myself rather good at.

Figs, raspberries, blackberries, cream

So, for two of us, I used 400g of mince.

Now it should have been a mixture of beef and pork (some recipes also use sausage meat or substitute it for the pork), but since no pork mince was forthcoming, I stuck with beef, without too much sense of major loss.

Two small slices of bread were soaked in a small amount of milk and then added to the meat, together with an egg.

Normally, I don't add milky bread or eggs to meatballs – they do not need it to bind – but these ingredients do help to make a particularly light meatball, and the Le Marinade experience suggested that this is what you want for Boles de Picolat.

The flavourings that were added were a good shake of smoky paprika, a little cinnamon and slightly less ginger. You just want a hint of spice to come through.

Once thoroughly mixed together and shaped into balls, these are rolled in plain flour and browned in olive oil.

Okay, I don’t usually flour my meatballs either, but when the mixture is this soft, it helps with the initial cooking. One of the recipes, clearly aimed at rather inexperienced cooks, offered a ‘tip’ in a sidebar, explaining how to four your meatballs by rolling them on a plate of flour. Rocket science.

Once browned, set the balls to one side.

Add a little more oil if you need, and soften a diced onion and some finely chopped garlic. I added a stick of finely chopped celery too.

Give it a very, very large squeeze of tomato purée – we’re probably talking half a 100g tube here – and stir gently into a little warm stock (I had a small jar of defrosted homemade chicken stock that was perfectly okay).

To all that, add some dried mushrooms, a cinnamon stick, some ground black pepper and some finely-chopped flat leaf parsley. Pop the meatballs back, lid it and cook gently for about half an hour.

At this point, test for seasoning and add salt if needed, then add a drained and rinsed tin of haricot or cannellini beans, and some drained green olives. Pop the lid back on and give it a further 30 minutes.

Serve in bowls with the broth, and top with more finely-chopped flat leaf parsley.

And that is that: easy and very tasty.

I might not seem as obviously ‘southern’ as, say, a ratatouille or a bourride, but it is every bit as much indicative of a region that includes mountain country as well as the coast and the plain.

Perfect Sunday brunch

As a fusion of north and south though, a quick Nigel Slater dessert of figs, served with clotted cream and a scatter of raspberries would take some beating – perfect at this time of year, and you could easily substitute blackberries for the raspberries depending on taste and availability.

The final food note for an autumnal weekend that is worth a mention is the joys of a decent home-cooked English brunch late on a Sunday morning, after a delicious doze snuggled beneath the covers.

Downland’s marmalade sausages and a huge, halved tomato were grilled, while tinned (sorry) mushrooms were cooked in butter.

Three eggs were scrambled in more butter and were served on real fried bread – cooked in lard, in other words.

The only other addition was HP sauce.

North or south, it’s good to remember that, even as you mourn the passing of summer, autumn has many glories and pleasures to offer.

A little harvest

Back at work, the first words that greeted me were along the lines of: ‘Hello! You look so brown! Did you have lots of great food?’

And, of course: ‘Are you looking forward to eating back in England again?’

Well actually, the answer is yes.

It’s a challenge – but one of the things I return with a sense of, is wanting to continue the cooking I’ve enjoyed in France. And that’s even more so this year, after feeling that I’d made such progress with getting a feel for the cuisine of the region – and cooking from French-language recipes.

The biggest issue is not a new one – bread. It’s no surprise that the French do less home baking than the British – they don’t need to.

With decent bakers everywhere, often baking twice a day, you can easily access impeccably fresh bread. And not just freshly baked, but delicious to eat. And a Percy Ingle loaf that stays ‘fresh’ for a week is most certainly not the same thing.

But after travelling back to Blighty on Saturday, the tiny farmers’ market on Sunday at least gave me the chance to get some food in without resorting to a supermarket – so quality fruit and veg was not a problem.

And Fin & Founder might have had little to offer on the same day, but they did have some decent pieces of salmon fillet.

I marinaded two pieces in lemon juice, olive oil, crushed garlic and paprika for a couple of hours, before covering the dish with foil and roasting at 150˚C for 20 minutes.

Taking a leaf out of the Pay Catalans book, I served it with a little rice, plus some aïoli – the egg free variety, with just garlic (a couple of cloves from the 2kg I carried home), a pinch of salt and then virgin oil – and a couple of baby orange plum tomatoes.

The drizzle of Balsamico didn't quite work – it was too thin. But the intention was there.

The garden has gone a little bonkers in my absence. There are loads of ripe tomatoes, so it’s pretty obvious one thing we’ll be eating in the coming days.

The chilies are coming on well too. And then there are the beans: a single runner bean is ready for harvesting, while there are four borlotti beans too.

But with myriad flowers now decorating the bamboo frame, together with around 16 baby pods, it’s a safe bet that there will be loads more borlotti to come. And there are even a small number of new broad bean flowers.

And if all that wasn’t enough, the grapes are swelling too.

The weather might have improved, but given what we had for most of the spring and summer, I’m still of the opinion that getting any sort of harvest this year is close to a miracle.

Planning for the start of the week obviously demanded a visit to La Bouche – there was no cheese in the house, to start with – and also produced three Toulouse sausages.

Those formed the centrepiece of last night’s dish. A mini harvest of the available borlotti beans saw those podded and boiled gently for 20 minutes.

In the meantime, a shallot, a couple of cloves of garlic and a stick of celery were chopped and placed in a pan with some olive oil. After they’d softened gently for a couple of minutes, the sausages were added and the cooking continued gently for a further 20 minutes, turning the sausage a couple of times.

The borlotti beans were added to the pan, together with half a dozen ripe, skinned tomatoes from the garden.

It was served with rice, which – and my solitary runner bean, which was divided into four pieces.

I’m not claiming these things were perfection, but at least they continued in a decent vein.

Whether I can maintain it remains to be seen.

Two ways with French black pudding

Sitting on our tiny, high-walled patio last night, as the wind whipped and whistled above, nursing an espresso and a glass of rosé, it was hard not feel a great sense of satisfaction.

Most immediately, perhaps, because I can drink coffee after a meal these days: it no longer seems to upset my stomach. Or perhaps that’s just when I’m in this neck of the woods.

But second, because I was enjoying rolling round in my mind a feeling that something, somewhere, has clicked slowly but decisively into place.

The other day – I have lost track of time a little – my revamped eating plans saw me nip into one of the village’s little alimentations after we’d finished with everything else for the day, and picking up an utterly essential packet of coffee, plus a pack of two boudin catalan.

Boudin noir is the French version of black pudding, although it’s moister than ours in the UK – possibly down to its still being prepared with raw blood. Boudin catalan is a lightly spiced regional version.

One of the recipes in the little book I’d picked up at the beginning of our holiday had stuck in my mind when mulling what to cook.

It was an omelette, with boudin, bacon, artichoke hearts – and various other ingredients.

Actually, it was more what we’d call a frittata, but let’s not be pedantic.

Since we hadn’t had any boudin at this stage – and we usually have it at least once while here – I decided to cook something along these lines.

Simply, I softened a large and finely chopped banana shallot in olive oil, before adding a couple of finely chopped cloves of garlic.

The local rose garlic is absolutely wonderful: I carried a kilo back to London last year. It was gone in six weeks. The intention this year is to double that.

Anyway, back to the frittata.

The shallot and garlic were allowed to cook very gently for a long while – probably far longer and far more gently than I’d normally do at home.

Into this went three of the remaining cooked potatoes from the duck a few days earlier, drained, dried and sliced.

A touch of paprika and a very generous grinding of black pepper were stirred in. Then the skinned and sliced boudin was added, before everything was topped with four large eggs, beaten and lightly seasoned.

It was cooked very gently for around 10 minutes (and checked to see if the egg had set enough that it would fall easily away from the side of the frying pan) before being popped under a pre-heated grill until it was just starting to turn golden.

Now I really don’t have the best record with frittatas – they’ve been, in the past, too solid and probably over-seasoned.

But that’s another thing that’s happening here, without any deliberate intent: the amount of salt I’m using has decreased. And I’m not finding that I need to add any when I get to the table.

What also appears to be happening is that I’m cooking at a less rushed pace – and this is almost certainly helping too.

But fast forward a couple of days. There was a boudin and a bit left over in the fridge, and it needed using up.

Popping into the alimentation again at the end of the day, I was wondering what to accompany it with, browsing the shelves, when I spotted tins of haricot beans.

The germ of an idea took root.

More shallot and garlic, chopped finely again and then softened just as gently in plenty of olive oil.

Then a couple of roasted peppers from a jar in the cupboard, sliced and popped in the pan, along with some of the beans, rinsed and drained, the remaining two potatoes (drained and dried) and a sprinkle of paprika.

And leave for a further 10 minutes of very gentle cooking.

Two teaspoons of Catalan tapenade (olives, tomatoes, peppers and spices) were stirred through, before the remaining boudin, skinned and sliced thickly, was added, and the whole given a further 10 minutes, so that meat could warm through.

It didn’t look particularly pretty, but it tasted pretty good, and all it needed on the side was the usual bread – not least to mop up the juices.

The feeling, though, was that something had clicked about cooking – slow and gentle particularly, but also in terms of a little bit of an understanding of and feel for the cuisine of this area.

Of course, sausage and beans is a classic combination, but I seem to be managing combinations better.

And all without a hundred cookbooks to hand – although I will stress that those books have helped me learn a very great deal: arguably a huge part of the foundation of what I’ve been doing here.

Back to Collioure

The only time that I'd ever travelled on a sleeper before, it was the Orient Express. They might still exist in the UK - London to Fort William and London to Cornwall - but I haven't had cause to contemplate such routes for many a year.

The last time I did, we were travelling back from Inverness to London, after a holiday on Skye with friends. It was during our time at The Morning Star, and the (frequently erratic) low pay meant that most staffers depended on goodwill from friends to be able to venture much beyond the capital.

It had been an intriguing break: my first ride on a horse had ended prematurely.

I had been doing rather well and was feeling a tad self-satisfied as we walked along, that I was managing to get to grips with the rise and fall of the animal's gait.

The The Other Half's mount, jogging behind, decided to bit the bum of mine. Somehow, I managed something like an elegant fall as I was thrown, clinging to the reins and breaking my fall - although I was still left nursing a spectacularly large bruise all down my left hip and thigh.

The woman who was leading our party was horrified. Complimenting me on my unplanned descent, she asked if I smoked - obviously a cure for such falls - and passed me a packet.

I was most certainly not getting back on. My head was spinning, although I wasn't seeing stars, but the 1991-'93 Arsenal away kit - an infamous, psychedelic abomination of yellow, with blue zig zags all over it.

The horse was tied to a gate post and I plumped myself down on a tuft of grass, fag packet grasped firmly, as the other trotted off for a canter around the Fairy Glen.

The holiday was also memorable because, quite amazingly, we saw the aurora borealis, a quite astonishing and beautiful sight.

And even though this was years before my foodie period started, I have two food memories too: of the discovery of haggis in the cafe/bar on the quay in Uig where we were staying - a dish I ate relentlessly, served by the buxom landlady who, rumour had it, also provided a different sort of service out of hours.

There were Staffin Bay prawns too, relished after a dreadful few hours clambering around in the Quiraing, which nearly defeated me as I struggled to get a foothold on the damned pea gravel.

And then there was the long, long train journey home. It was overnight. Our friends, god love them, told us, rather shamefacedly, that they'd managed to get a sleeper cabin. They left us with a tray of beer and fled to their cabin.

It was a pretty dismal night, the discomfort and the tiredness hardly assuaged by the beer. And it put us off lengthy train journeys for some time.

But in more recent years, we have enjoyed travelling through France by train and, after that Venice trip, we'd discovered that a number of sleeper services exist across the Continent.

So we came to this year and an idea started to take shape. Much as the journey from London to Collioure by train is one we enjoy, it eats up the first day of any holiday. Air travel doesn't shorten things much, if you take into account getting to airport, and doing so to face a two-hour check in.

The plan was simple: leave the office on Euston Road on our final Friday at work, walk the few hundred metres to St Pancras with our bags and get the Eurostar to Paris.

From there, we'd have a couple of hours to get across the French capital to Gare d'Austerlitz. From there, we'd board an overnight service to Portbou, the first stop in Spain  on the Mediterranean route. Collioure is just four stops before. And after Narbonne, the service stops everywhere, so we wouldn't even have to change.

The first leg of the journey went entirely as normal.

The second leg, across a quiet Paris marked by the traditional August desertion of its residents, was, as always, a pleasure.

Gare d'Austerlitz is undergoing serious renovation and is hardly the best of the city's stations at present, but taking a cab across town gave us the time to find a café just outside and sit down for a much-needed meal.

For the record, I chicken and chips. With gravy. We expected little more than fuel - and it served its purpose.

Boarding was easy enough, and we eventually found our carriage on the vast train. The compartment we were in had four bunks. In the height of the holiday season, you can't pay the extra to have a compartment to yourself, so having settled ourselves on our allotted lower bunks, we waited to see if we'd have company.

It's very simple. You have a pillow, a light sleeping bag, a bottle of water, earplugs, a wet wipe and a rubbish bag. That's it. Since it's communal, you do not undress fully.

Sure enough, shortly before departure, a French couple joined us. The most basic of polite pleasantries exchanged, they climbed up.

It was dark as we pulled out, a little before 10pm, French time. With nothing to see outside,  everyone seemed to agree, wordlessly, that it was time to get comfortable and turn out the main light.

There were little lights at the head of each bunk, but they didn't make reading easy. Within less than 30 minutes, we had all quietly bedded down.

If it was quiet in our cabin, it was less so elsewhere, as parents tried to calm down children delighted by the absolutely fantastic combination of bunks and a train.

It was warm - no, it was seriously sultry. The air conditioning only starts when the train does.

But it was still surprisingly restfully - even when the train banked and you felt yourself pulled, as though by a tide.

There are questions of etiquette to worry, though. After all, you're sleeping with complete strangers. What if you snore? What if they snore? What happens if you fart? Oh now come on - that wasn't me!

The cabin door opened, letting in light. Breaking from a half doze, I could see a large figure quietly tap the sleeper in the upper bunk opposite.

It was the guard with a wake-up call.

Our fellow travellers quickly and quietly disembarked, by which time The Other Half had stirred, and I'd flipped the light on to reveal that it was 6.15am.

Where were we?

Dawn was just about beginning. Straightening myself up a little, I stood in the corridor and tried to see a sign on the platform outside. Only as we drew out did I discover that, as I suspected, it was Narbonne.

With light coming up and less than two hours to go, we took advantage of the privacy and changed - me into a swimming costume, shorts and a t-shirt, ready for the beach. Frankly, even if we'd not been intending to hit the shore, the change would have been welcome: sleeping in a bra is not comfortable.

The route was familiar: past the lagoons and the salt marsh, with the sea tantalisingly in view on the horizon and then ducking away; a stretch I adore.

And this was seeing it differently, anew.

A red glowing dawn; mercury water, mirror still; a lone heron standing alert. Swifts on the first dart of the day; tufted grass and water; west Roussilon's garrigue, with clouds in perfect reflection.

My eyes were greedy, gobbling up everything I could set them on.

Port-la-Nouvelle gone; Leucate-la-Franqui a thing of the past; Rivesaltes behind us.

Outside, vineyards and olive trees and bougainvillea in purple majesty.

Then Perpignan - Dali's 'centre of the world'. Elne next, then Argeles sur Mer, the train gradually shedding more and more passengers, wiping sleep from their eyes as they stepped down into the Mediterranean light.

And then, mere moments and a tunnel later, Collioure.

We left the train and headed out, down the hill and into the village. I wanted to kiss the ground.

It was just 8am. First things first. Breakfast at Délices Catalans: coffee and croissants: flaky and buttery, light-as-a-feather and still-warm.

We were back.